Shame may've been cast on Pluto for masquerading as a planet, but that doesn't mean the "mechanical calculating device" that helped find it in our wide, wide sky is any less important. Particularly when it's called "The Millionaire."

He was the man who launched a thousand imaginary rocketships to Mars — in the nineteenth century, before anybody knew the word "Martian" and War of the Worlds hadn't been written yet. Percival Lowell, a wealthy Bostonian, spent his youth traveling Japan and Korea before having a nervous breakdown and recovering by…